Majority of SMB execs willing to pay in a ransomware situation

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05/04/2019

Doug Olenick at SC Magazine writes about how the ‘Majority of SMB execs willing to pay in a ransomware situation’. A new study shows that a majority of smaller businesses would acquiesce and pay to have their data released in a case where they were hit with a ransomware attack and could not recover the data on their own.

The cloud security company AppRiver’s Q2 Cyberthreat Index for Business Survey found that 55 percent of 1,035 smaller business, those with fewer than 250 employees, would pay a cyberattacker in order to recover their data. This figure jumps to 74 percent among companies at the higher end of this spectrum — 150 to 250 employees. Of that cohort, 39 percent said they would definitely pay a ransom of almost any price to prevent their data from being leaked or lost.

The sectors that are most willing to pay were technology, financial and insurance, government, and telecom.

“A possible explanation is that financial, government, tech and telecom have the resources to pay; they also have the most to lose if their reputation is hit by news of a cyber breach. The recent payroll hacking on the city of Tallahassee and the March 2018 ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta were both estimated to have cost the local governments millions in data system repair and PR damages,” AppRiver told SC Media.

However, 45 percent of those surveyed reported that they would not pay any ransom.